And dont forget the scissor keyboard and the fucking touchbar

> but recovered nicely afterwards

After Ives was fired/forced out/decided to leave to pursue his creative vision.

Yeah my only complaint with Apple hardware these days is all the sharp edges. I miss the soft, rounded sides of touchID based iPhones.

This was the last gasp of Johnny Ive. And yes, it was terrible. It got us ending the incredibly successful Macbook Air for the too-compromised 12" Macbook (1 port, remember?), the pointless Touch Bar and the terrible butterly keyboard (remember how dust could kill it and I'm sure Apple spent a fortune on replacements?).

Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low.

Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.

I dug out my old iPod from a drawer. Put the charger in - it took a couple days for it to charge. And then it was working just fine, except that the servers no longer supported the apps on it.

But the iPod is still so nice. I wish I could have a phone with that form factor. Even if it just had VOIP. The big phones are often just too much.

That's a really good point to remember and counters the article's claim that there were no major recalls.

Still, the M series laptops are so much better than offerings from competitors I am hesitant to even put them in the same product category.

The missteps of those intel MacBooks are undeniable, but I also feel like the new design feels very safe and unambitious. There is the huge notch. The 16" model is (given screen and battery size) 35% heavier than competitors and not exactly a joy to lug around. The keycaps continue to be made of subpar ABS getting a oily look within mere month of usage. The use of space inside is not very efficient compared to previous models.

I generally agree, but I had the misfortune of having a tiny grain of something (it was truly microscopic) wedged between my screen and the tiny rubber gasket around the edge and that completely disabled my screen and cost $800 to repair. I'm glad they moved away from the thin obsession, and I generally agree that the new design gives the impression of robustness even if that wasn't my experience. :)

I had this opinion until I actually had a new model and felt the weight difference.

The duality of Man

Why do you prefer the laptop to be thicker and heavier?

Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish

It wouldn't be HN if someone didn't dredge up a decade-old axe to grind.

Do you use a case? My guess would be that when you swipe up, you're not quite starting low enough, perhaps unconsciously, because of the case being in the way. See if a case with a thinner front or smaller bezels helps. Using your index finger also works better than the thumb.

If that doesn't help, there are some settings you can try:

1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch and turn on AssistiveTouch. Under Custom Actions, set Single-Tap to Home. Now you have a home button. You can move this button anywhere on your screen and adjust its "Idle Opacity" so it's less distracting when not in use.

2. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose Double Tap or Triple Tap. Select Home from the list of actions. Now you can tap on the back side of your phone to go home.

There's also Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Touch Accommodations, but that's more about preventing accidental touches and swipes, so that would probably make the situation worse for you.

It took me forever to upgrade because I was afraid the same thing would happen to me. Luckily it didn't, but I can imagine the frustration.

You are probably not swiping up from down enough.

> IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it.

They both bought into hysteria and they've likely already wasted billions on it. Are you forgetting the interminable ads and announcements of "Apple Intelligence" from two years ago when even iPhones were marketed as AI-ready?

Honestly, I'm pretty bullish on Apple and AI. I think there move is in local, open source models. These are getting better and better for generic ChatGPT—type tasks. I'm kind of waiting for Apple to ship their own Ollama. And it's going to be a huge win for both them and consumers.

You can’t compare Apple to any other company. Apple is the only successful consumer hardware company (with Samsung being a distant second). They can afford to sit out the AI arms race.

You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.

> Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship

You must be working with shit engineers. Every product I've ever worked on, it's the engineers holding the line on quality while the side of the house that has to care about costs steadily cuts

I think it's fair to say there are plenty of people in Apple's leadership that would have had the authority to tell Alan Dye "no". They didn't. I think it's fair to say that the company leadership likes liquid glass. The reaction to it was about as divided when they presented it as it is now. If they thought the backlash warranted a change in direction they could have pulled it before it ever made it to users in the fall, like they did with numerous attempts at shipping AI features. A major reversal in the next version would make a lot of people look really really bad.

I think there’s a happy medium between doing nothing and burning cash faster than the US military like OpenAI. If I had to pick one company who walking that line the best, it’s Google.

You can wait until improving hardware eventually solves the local LLM problem but imho that’s too passive.

What if someone cracks the problem of splitting LLM inference effectively between local device and server? Think about it. ChatGPT can do calculus. Is that useful to most people? No. Can you currently effectively modularize an LLM and load knowledge on demand? No.

I’m fairly bearish on the use cases for current AI. The biggest is actually just firing people and suppressing labor costs.

But a personas assistant, at least in theory, is something people want, even if it’s just to effectively obey voice commands. If Apple loses to Google here it’s going to be bad for Apple. I think they have to do more than they’re seemingly doing.

Okay, so assume that's the hypothesis...

Siri is STILL utter garbage. It's like a POC so many times. Its accent recognition for me is horrible, and it feels like so many of its interaction types are hardcoded, like "Do X at this time" "Sure". "Do Y (very similar thing) at this time" "I can't do that".

And while I get (but don't necessarily always agree with) per-app isolation, it leads to absolutely comical things. My fiance has Siri turned off. Uses CarPlay. Can text me with voice commands. But she can be navigating somewhere, and say "Hey, find me the nearest Starbucks" and Siri will say, with a straight face, while the phone is navigating her somewhere, "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".

Siri was the first of its kind on Day 1. Alexa wasn’t announced for another three years.

It's so good, you won't even want to use it!

The other thing that always got me about the car was.. I wondered if the executives at Apple had all become too rich? Apple sells premium hardware but generally sells products in the 10s or 100s of millions of volume, so pretty mass market consumer good.

The car seemed to be solving the "what if we could make a $100k car"?

At some point of wealth people become so disconnected from normal everyday life of normal people that I suspect they lose the ability to identify problems & solutions that 200M consumers have/need.

I thought it was funny/telling that Ive's first product after leaving Apple was a limited edition collaboration project on a.. battery powered LED lamp for sailboats starting at $5k. He said it was inspired by the need for a durable lamp for his sailboat.

Not exactly bicycle for the brain / 1000 albums in your pocket / instant access to the world information kind of vibes.

The car always made the least sense to me in that its the polar opposite of what Apple had evolved to. High-capex in-house manufacturing onshore in a highly regulated space vs capital-light outsourced contract manufacturing offshore of discretionary purchase consumer goods.

There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.

An Apple car would be crazy expensive to develop and not really a guaranteed sell at all. There's millions of people that are very loyal to Apple of iPhone and wearable but going to an Apple car is a HUGE jump.

> Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.

They tried. But the irony is MS is more deeply ingrained. I worked a short stint in a shop that no joke ran Windows server to manage a whole floor of Macs using Active Directory. The only other Windows PC was a machine hooked to a large format printer. I spoke to the admin (dyed in the wool Apple user) who stated that as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.

Nobody "uses" rack mount servers as artefacts, the way people use other Apple hardware products. Not in the same sense, so I don't think Apple can really bring much of the kind of value they usually do. In practice Apple data centres are Linux facilities, and that's fine. Maybe if they could come up with a really compelling reason to put Apple silicon in a data centre, but we can do that now with racked Minis or Studios.

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-studio/overview.h...

Making cars is just a low margin business with a huge manufacturing footprint. They'd have been competing directly with Chinese EV makers. Dodged a bullet IMO

Yeah the car always seemed (to humble me) to be so… un-Apple. As in, the iphone was a success because of its aesthetics but also it solved a real problem, while creating a whole new market. But in the case of cars, cars are the problem.

You're asking why they wouldn't pivot to making a regular EV, but I think the Apple way is to ask why they SHOULD make a regular EV.

They could do a lot of things that would make money. The hard part is figure out which ones to say no to.

A car is a terrible idea for Apple. Apple doesn't make mechanical things, and it's a business with high capital costs and low margins.

I'd personally be a buyer for some home stuff, but the average normie consumer just doesn't care very much about home automation. IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing. I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years.

You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space.

The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.

I think the home automation market is waiting on things that most people really want and a lower barrier to entry.

Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

What has household automation really given us so far? Dimmable lights? Whatever. If I cared, I'd already have rheostats on all my light switches. Thermostat? My digital thermostat is already good enough.

The thing that would sell like crazy is a robot valet.

In other words, the ability to navigate carelessly through your home, dropping items when you are no longer interested in them and have them "magically" return to their proper homes.

Such a thing would need to be able to roam around your home and pick things up and store them, and then retrieve them when appropriate (when asked or based on schedules and other automations). Maybe even do a little light dusting.

If you can make it take out the trash, fold laundry, and empty the dishwasher, you're looking at a ridiculously popular system. Even if it costs thousands of dollars.

Thing is, the tech isn't really ready to give us a household robot that can pick your jacket up off the couch and put it away. When we can do that, it will be huge.

Once we are there, we've grown so used to the idea of an adversarial relationship with the businesses that provide our services, that we are being spied on and our data sold, would we even trust the systems that would be needed to enable such products?

Your points are why Apple isn’t entering that market.

Mounts, cases, smart locks, thermostats, bulbs…where is the “iPhone moment” for this sector? It’s all small beans now. Why would Apple want to compete here?

Personally I think any big moves in this area would be predicated on a next-level Siri companion. Stop futzing around with scenes, buttons, switches and pairing devices and just tell your house how it should work.

Yeah IOT / connected home seems like the most reasonable area but they are probably waiting for the market to mature a bit.

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It isn't innovation if you don't get 99 Vision Pro's per iPhone.

Gemini is a great product

That would require a lot of courage

> It doesn't even have to be hardware. Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software.

There was already a change in software with Alan Dye's departure and Stephen Lemay taking over:

* https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/04/john-gruber-on-alan-dye...

AIUI, lots of folks internal to Apple were not happy with Dye, and are happy with Lemay. Some consider it a failing of the executive that Dye wasn't pushed out sooner (rather than choosing to jump himself).

- go head to head against google workspace

- apple public cloud

Lets go!

From a usability standpoint. Do you expect everyone to wear glasses? Are people going to all be out in public talking and doing hand gestures as input to their glasses? You don’t need to cater to different people who need different prescriptions for their fingers and for me, I have prescription glasses with two separate prescriptions and transition lenses.

That’s not going to happen. Most people don’t like having to speak out loud in order to message, AI-chat, or use voice commands in public, and many not even in private.

> defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit

People repeat this but when I ran the math on earlier Social Security payments it seems like the accrued $, by the time you're eligible for the higher benefit, is plenty similar as bonus income.

> the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.

Maybe not, if you take into account the >$500/month subsidy of your Medicare Part A benefits (assuming you had the minimum number of calendar quarters paid in). And your Part B payment (the one usually deducted from your Soc Sec payment) is also partly subsidized unless your income is high enough to trigger IRMAA adjustment.

But is Medicare as good as the insurance you had before?

I know this is a joke. But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else. I always found it pretty odd before I realized I only make a trade 1 or 2% of the time.

"Should I use a 3.5% or a 4% safe withdrawal rate? My house is paid off and I got a company pension, two dogs and a partner. Cars are paid off but our iPhones are on a payment plan till 2028. Net worth around $2.5 billion but highly concentrated in one company"

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Companies can (aqui)hire expertise as well.

Citation?

Apple Silicon is not used for inference in the majority of OpenClaw setups. macOS is popular for OpenClaw, but you can get the same results on a Linux, Windows or even ChromeOS client. There are OpenClaw desktops that run on a Raspberry Pi.

In the broader inference/training market, Apple Silicon is a non-entity compared to systems like the GB100.

It isn't.

It just happens to be popular among openclaw users who don't understand how it works. Which is the perfect target audience.

neah, that's like saying because ie was used to download chrome you own the ecosystem.

llms will be the new search and you'll delegate to them a lot, because it's so convenient (not saying it will be great!).

The transformer architecture will be 10 years old, next year. We're in the second or third inning of LLMs right now, depending on how much credit you give ELMo and BERT.

Cool article! I never saw that one, even though I do read that blog.

I'd argue that it was from 2018, and it's a different world today. Since then, Microsoft has made a pretty extreme pivot towards the "do things for you" camp and they seem to have become absolutely convinced that "AI" was vaguely the thing they wanted to do for you.

I think a major difference is that Apple doesn’t see factories purely as stores where you buy the stuff they advertise they can make; it cooperates with manufacturers to get them to build things that they couldn’t make before.

They are willing to pay billions up front to get production lines built to their specifications and guarantee that they will buy X products over Y time, in exchange for exclusivity.

For example, when Apple decided they wanted to use CNC aluminum milling to build laptop frames, no factory could do that at their scale and desired precision.

And yes, you can only do that if you have lots of cash flowing around, but that’s not sufficient. You also need a process that gives you a very good chance that such investments pay out.

I would earnestly suggest reading Apple In China:

https://www.amazon.com/Apple-China-Capture-Greatest-Company/...

It both captures Tim's genius and the genius of the person much geniuser than him: Xi Jinping.

I bet it's more about what he didn't do. Like how a stable marriage seems boring but is the accumulation of many many right (by necessarily genius) decisions.

I mean sounds like you are asking the question "What is the job of a CEO?"

I think this is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory fallacy. There is a correlation to Cook and the performance, but the idea that this was all because of one single guy at the top is survivor bias. For example, other companies didn't fail at outsourcing to China because their CEOs weren't as personally involved as Cook, it was because the team as a whole didn't perform.

Looking today, Trump is as much a symptom as the problem. He didn't get there just because of who he is, he rode on the backs of all the people who voted for him, the state legislators who gerrymandered for him, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, etc...

Apple funds creation of new factories in return for exclusive use of the parts they produce. I believe they also prefer to negotiate pricing down to cost, then pay bonuses for meeting quantity/date goals.

Supposedly, the reason there weren't more iPod competitors back in the day was that Apple already had negotiated exclusive rights at pre-negotiated prices to buy a big chunk of the flash memory that otherwise would have been on the market.

This is one of those things like becoming chess #1: all you have to do is make the optimal decision in a series of meetings, over and over again, for years.

I don't know, but he was Chief Operations Officer when all of this happened, so whatever happened in those regards happened on his watch and should be credited to him (as well as those reporting to him).

It's not like Microsoft's head of gaming has no bearing on their horrible mismanagement of the studios they bought and shuttered. That person was responsible. Do I know what they did day to day? No. But there's someone new in that position and I think that tells us something.

I think this is something a lot of people who haven't managed others before find hard to understand

The easiest example I've found is comparing a manager to a conductor in an orchestra.

Most people will only see a conductor on the night of the performance, and they don't look like they do much, but a lot of the work is actually done before the night.

The main issue is that because there are so many musicians in an orchestra, it's hard to have an overall view of what everyone's doing and if a piece sounds good.

The main job of the conductor is to be the person who has that big picture. They make sure everyone is playing in time and in key. And if they're tricky parts of the piece - they make sure it's played properly. If it isn't, they hold individual practice sessions to make those parts smoother. If some musicians aren't performing well, they have conversations with them and maybe let them go. If there aren't enough musicians they hire more. And if the pieces aren't working they change them from the millions of pieces available to play. And they have to do it in a way so as not to make the orchestra angry and all quit!

So to answer your question what does Tim Cook actually do? Does he tell his staff the priority is moving xyz units, does he come up with the core strategy, does he pick up good ideas from his staff. The answer is most likely yes to all the above - but that's such a small part of it.

The big thing he needs to do is have a vision for how he wants the business to be, and then do those parts you mentioned, plus the hundreds of other tasks and decisions to get it there.

Read the “Apple in China” book.

I believe the idea was either his or Steve Jobs's.

I don't know how much of the details were his, but taking the risk and seeing it through deserves a lot of credit.

For most companies (even now), the idea of JIT manufacturing is terrifying. How will they guarantee there isn't a slowdown and you'll have a shortage at Christmas (or in any random month)? Most CEOs like always having some inventory. They went in the opposite direction and decided the ideal case was not having any inventory.

I was overly sleepy due to prescribed sleeping pills when I woke up at 6am to preorder my M5 MacBook Pro. I got stuck on the order page for five minutes because I didn't notice that I had to pick the color and hadn't done so. I checked out ten minutes after preorders went live and that cost me a week on delivery whereas I normally complete preorders fast enough to have my product arrive on the day of release.

We ordered a MacBook Neo for my partner and she had to wait three weeks for it despite the company obviously expecting strong interest in the product at launch.

> The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS

Pandemic and supply chain issues surely contributed to that. It can't be cited without context.

I just bought an M5 Macbook from an electronics retailer because they actually stocked it, whereas ordering the same machine for the same price from Apple would have been a custom build delivered mid May.

Well you currently can’t buy a desktop Mac with decent ram at any price, and right now ebay and marketplace are full of people scalping Mac minis.

I've been waiting a few weeks for the blush Neo I ordered

google says 3x more, but it's still nothingburger. galaxy is the one on parity with it. I have a pixel and I had to go through hoops in order to buy one in another country and have it brought in and I'm in EU. Samsung doesn't have those issues, but it lags between announcing and shipping. Apple is the only one I know that announces something and it's available either today or within days. Lenovo announces and then nothing - they have announced x1 carbon gen 14 in january.. still can't buy it. It's laughable. This is Tim Cook's value and it can't be denied.

To be honest no genius every existed under sun. What did Newton do? Just applied some common sense. If apple is not flying away there has to be some force pulling it down, he just named it gravity. What did Einstein do? Using Riemann geometry to already prevailing ideas. Not much of genius, using already invented things I'd say. What did Edison do? If one conducts thousand failed experiment a few might succeed. It doesn't take a genius to get that. And so on and on.

> Thiel has openly supported fascism, "Democracy and Freedom are not compatible" is a pretty extreme position, so we should be wary of what he says and does.

Precisely, because we should be thinking about why he's saying and doing it. It's not just because he likes the sound of his own voice.

> The west .. Boeing and Rolls Royce

Boeing is a US company. RR is, last time I looked, a UK company. "The West" isn't a coherent political unit.

Besides, this is the exact opposite of the FDI strategy of past decades. How far should the ban on overseas FDI go? Ban on investing in South America? Full capital controls? As you mention, passport confiscation (!) for key nationals? I don't think any of this would have worked for "the west" at any point past about 1970, or even post-WW2.

> Japan was indisputably an ally of the US, whereas China has never been.

Except for the time we were indisputably not allies with Japan and were with China.

> condemning tens of millions to abject poverty

I think you're overstating your point a bit; I'm not convinced that the tens of millions are that much worse off than their counterparts in poorer parts of China. Was there ever a massive assembly plant for iPhones in the US?

(also, everyone in this subthread seems to be arguing that the US should be at least in part a planned economy with state-directed industry?)

The idea lingered for longer than that. China under Hu Jintao wasn’t exactly friendly to the west, but it was Xi who really set China on its present course to build a multi-polar world, make real noise about reunification with Taiwan, etc.

This new direction didn’t become clear to both sides of the aisle in the US until a year or two into Xi’s tenure. If someone else other than Xi had been chosen, we would likely have a very different China today.

Hegemony is great for peace, but I think it inevitably turns into a kind of imperialism, even when well-intentioned.

Thanks, that seems like a reasonable way to do it, if it were to be done, though the types of manufacturing would have to be very specific.

We could perhaps outsource mass precision manufacturing of aluminum iphone and macbook cases to Germany, or try to build up the industry over time in the US that would enable such manufacturing. But such multi-year delays that are kinda-sorta in the interest of a nation but not at all in the immediate interest of a private company and US consumers, imposed by politicians that have not bothered to dive deep into the issue but are instead responding to half-informed populist revolt, seem like a dangerous path.

If something like that were to be done, a carrot approach is far more likely to yield better outcomes than the stick approach of export controls, IMHO.